A Ubiquitous Subjectivity?

Unabashedly
polemical, this argument is the necessary precursor to rethinking
our approaches both to the study of music and to the idea of subjectivity.
As more and more kinds of music are played in more and more settings
alongside more and more activities, it becomes crucial to develop
ways of approaching this phenomenon. As Gifford puts it,

Muzak anticipated the way we live our lives
today, accompanied by a constant soundtrack of radio, television,
video and film Muzaks real significance is that it
paved the way for a new ambient culture, a culture that Sensurrounds
us with digitized music and pixelated images, endlessly looping
screen savers and point-of-purchase interactive displays, occupying
all areas of our multitasking minds. (installment 6, page 3)

But many analysts
insist on continuing to see the music industry in very traditional
terms. According to the phenomenal foresight of experts in an October
7th, 2000 Economist special supplement on E-entertainment,
for example:

If the music industry manages to sort out the
piracy problem, the Internet will become a hugely important
source of revenue. The record companies sold their music all
over again when the CD came out, and they can now sell it all
over again over the Internet, again. What is more, they can
sell it in more flexible packages to make it more attractive
to different kinds of consumers. (A Survey 32)

What the writers
of the Economist clearly understand is that, the RIAAs
best efforts notwithstanding, digital music delivery over the Internet
is inevitable and all the industrys watermarking and security
efforts are doomed to failure. What they dont understand, and
apparently dont even think about, are the vast social changes
attendant on these new technologies. The same music will be sold yet
a third time, in more flexible packages, precisely because it makes
it easier to use the music as an environmental technology, conditioning
and conditioned by a new kind of subjectivity.

This third selling
is a performance of the ubicomp world in the making. Its attendant
subjectivity is not individual, not defined by Oedipus or agency or
any discrete unity. The listener of this third selling is no mere
subject, but rather a part of an always moving ever-present web. S/he
is not a listener of a genre first and foremost, but rather a listener
tout court. Ubiquitous music is cable that networks all of
us together, not in some dystopian energy-producing array à
la The Matrix, but in a lumpy deployment of dense nodes of knowledge/power
figured by, for example, the SETI@home project. SETI@home uses home
computers when they are otherwise idle as a resource for ramping up
computer processing power for the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence
project. In this extreme model of distributed computing, each home
computer is a little lump or node in an enormous array of computing
activity. Likewise, we are each nodes in an enormous array of listening.

There are numerous
attempts to describe what Im getting at here, from many different
directionsfrom Xerox PARC, to Donna Haraway, to Gilles Deleuze
and Felix Guattari. In Autoaffections: Unconscious Thought in the
Age of Teletechnology, Patricia Clough proposes a new ontological
perspective and an unconscious other than the one organized by an
oedipal narrative (20). Throughout, Autoaffections works
in two genresacademic prose and prose poetry. Not only the chapters,
but also the genre shifts themselves are performances of the books
work.

Autoaffection
opens with a prose poem, Television: A Sacred Machine,
which is a work of remarkable power, both more beautiful and clear
than what we usually call theory. Clough says:

My machine has more parts; it has more action,
Like the action of fingertips attached to ivory keys,
Playing in between the beats of a metronomes patterning.
(22)

The node we usually
call self is attached through keys that make hammers hit
wires that make sound that attaches to another node, sound disciplined
by the metronome machine to attach the nodes in particular ways.

Still, I was destined by that piano,
Destined to find myself in attachment to machines. (25)

This attachment
is, as I have suggested, the stuff of contemporary science fiction.
Cyborgs, matrices, webs, netsall these dystopias threaten us
with the dissolution of the boundaries of our very selves. But they
fail to see what Clough hears: that dissolution is already well under
way.

What I am proposing
is a theory of subjectivity based on ubiquitous music called ubiquitous
subjectivity. Like ubiquitous music, parts phase in and out of participation
in ubiquitous subjectivity, but it never leaves usand we never
leave it. If that sounds ominous, it isnt meant to. Its
simply a habit of mind from an earlier notion about our discreteness,
and its time to notice that ubiquitous music and ubiquitous
listening have been forging a different subjectivity for quite some
time now. Like Star Treks Borg, we are uncomfortable
being unhooked from the background sound of ubiquitous subjectivity,
so we turn radios on in empty rooms and put speakers under our pillows.
We hang up when a telephone connection is not kept open by sound.
We prefer to be connected, need to listen to our connections, cant
breathe without them. We already live a network we insist on thinking
of as a dystopian future.

This networked-through-music
subjectivity could seem similar to ideas about music and collectivity.
As Eisler and Adorno argue in Composing for the Films, many
anthropologists and writers about music suggest that music operates
differently from the oculocentric individual of contemporary Western
culture. They say that music listening:

preserves comparably more traits of long
bygone, preindividualistic collectivities . This direct
relationship to a collectivity, intrinsic in the phenomenon
itself, is probably connected with sensations of spatial depth,
inclusiveness, and absorption of individuality, which are common
to all music. (21)

Other writers do
not attribute this collective quality to music per se, but
doquite rightlynote that music is a part of many social
formations and practices in different historical and cultural settings.

I am not suggesting
that ubiquitous music has reintroduced such a collective identity
through music to modern or postmodern societies. Far from it. What
I am arguing, rather, is that ubiquitous music has become a form of
phatic communication for late capitalismits purpose is to keep
the lines of communication open for that lumpy deployment of dense
nodes of knowledge/power we call selves. We are Borg because isolated
consciousnesssilenceis unpleasurable in the extreme.

As we enter the
second century of the disarticulation of performance and listening,
new relations are developing that demand new models and approaches.
It is easy to see that the industry is changing. It is perhaps harder
to hear the changes in music, in listening and in subjectivity that
all of this portends. Yet musics, technologies, science fiction, social
relations and subjectivities have been fermenting these changes throughout
the twentieth century. At least in the metropolis, listening to music
is ubiquitous, and it forms the network backbone of a new, ubiquitous
subjectivity.